Oliver Sacks: His Own Life

[Retired]

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life
Medscape Medical News
February 19, 2015


Dr Oliver Sacks

After years of tackling difficult neurologic conditions in his practice and his writings, British-born neurologist Oliver Sacks, MD, addresses another disease in an essay today in the New York Times ? his own terminal illness.

In it, Dr Sacks, a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and author of many popular books, including Awakenings (which was made into a major motion picture) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, discusses his diagnosis and his plans for the time he has left.

"A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health," Dr Sacks writes. "At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out -- a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver.

"Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2%.

"I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

"It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me," he writes. "I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can."

In this, he says he is encouraged by the words of David Hume, who, upon learning of his own terminal illness, wrote his autobiography in a single day in April 1776. The biography was titled My Own Life, a title also used for this essay.

In it, Hume wrote of his good spirits in the face of his bodily decline, with "the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company."

Dr Sacks counts himself lucky to have lived 15 years beyond Hume's 65, years that "have been equally rich in work and love," he writes. "In that time, I have published five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume's few pages) to be published this spring. I have several other books nearly finished."

In the time he has left to him, he hopes "to deepen my friendships, say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight."

He plans no longer to pay attention to things like politics or arguments about global warming, not because he doesn't care deeply, he writes, but because "these are no longer my business; they belong to the future."

Dr Sacks' full editorial can be found here.

 

[Retired]

Oliver Sacks: A Tribute
Medscape Neurology
April 01, 2015

In a February 15, 2015, op-ed in the New York Times, renowned neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks announced that he has terminal cancer. "At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out..." he revealed, before penning an incredibly thoughtful, moving essay on facing mortality?on processing one's place and legacy in the world, and appreciating what time remains. "There is no time for anything inessential," Dr Sacks wrote, "I shall no longer look at 'NewsHour' every night."

As a tribute to Dr Sacks, Medscape has collected some thoughts from physicians, physician authors, and Dr Sacks' colleagues on his legacy and contributions to medicine and literature.

Sandeep Jauhar, MD, PhD, Director, Heart Failure Program, Long Island Jewish Medical Center; author of Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)

When I was in graduate school at Berkeley, well before I decided to go to medical school, I once made a list of people I admired for a career interests test. The list included Einstein, Freud, Larry Bird, my brother Rajiv? "a little"?Orson Welles, and Oliver Sacks. Sacks' writings have had a profound effect on me and other physicians (and physician writers).

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars?these are books I remember so vividly, for their foreignness, and yet their worlds seemed so real because of that foreignness. Sacks wrote about his neurologically quirky characters with so much sincerity and humanity that he made you want to go anywhere with him, both in the literary sense but also in a personal sense. He seemed to be such a good, caring doctor and human being, the kind of person you'd want as a best friend. I didn't go to medical school to become a writer, but Oliver Sacks showed me that both pursuits were possible and could nourish each other. In my book, he (and perhaps Abraham Verghese) are the best physician writers we have.

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, Chair of Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center; Psychiatrist in Chief, New York-Presbyterian Hospital; immediate past president of the American Psychiatric Association; author of Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry (Little, Brown, 2015)

I first encountered Oliver Sacks in 1979, when I began working at the Bronx Psychiatric Center. I sent a patient of mine to the neurology clinic for evaluation and received a report that immediately grabbed my attention.

Handwritten in meticulously styled script and sparkling prose was a compelling narrative of the patient's history and elucidation of his diagnosis. Rather than the dry, clinically formulaic medical consults that I was used to getting (and guilty of myself), this consult read like a short story.

Wondering who had composed this extraordinary missive, I visited the clinic and introduced myself to Oliver. He was a gnome-like little man, short and stout in stature with bald head and full beard, a twinkle in his eye and an unusual cadence in his voice, with a lilting British accent. From that brief interaction, it was apparent to me that Oliver was a uniquely gifted person with amazing observational and expressive talents. I was struck by the incongruity of this rarefied talent squirreled away in a dingy clinic of a state mental institution.

Despite these modest beginnings, I was not surprised when, years later, he became a best-selling author. Our careers came full circle in 2007, when he joined the faculty at Columbia University as an Arts and Sciences Scholar; he quickly became a favorite with students and residents. However, Oliver suffered from hearing, ophthalmologic, and orthopedic problems, which began to limit the scope of his activities. Through it all, he continued to be intellectually and physically vital, and continued his writing.

From that first consult that I received to the recent New York Times article. Oliver has remained true to his medical muse.

Carolyn Robinowitz, MD, Former President, American Psychiatric Association; Former Dean, Georgetown University

Live as though you will die tomorrow; learn as if you will live forever. ?Attributed to Gandhi

When I was president of the APA, I chose Dr Sacks to lead the William C. Menninger Memorial Convocation Lecture at the APA Annual Meeting in May of 2008. Historically, this lecture addresses scientific issues in a manner accessible to both a professional academic audience as well as a broader public. As always, Oliver Sacks was informative as well as accessible, thought-provoking, and inspirational.

In his article "My Own Life," Dr Sacks once again combines instruction with inspiration, this time with the most important topic: his own life and impending death.

Dr Sacks has captivated and informed the lay public as well as scientific communities with his scholarly yet accessible writing, leading many young people to study neuroscience and the complex interactions of biology and behavior. Now, his frank and thoughtful essay prompts all of us to scrutinize our own lives?our personal and professional relationships, values, and priorities.

For most of us, thoughts of our death are accompanied by denial and delay; yet it is in thinking about death that we think most strongly about life?what is most meaningful to us, how we want to live, and what will be our legacy to our dear ones and our communities. Dr Sacks' candid and courageous presentation reminds us of his brilliance and insight and helps us address, in our own ways, the opportunities as well as limits of our lives.

More Thoughts on Dr Sacks

Robert C. Griggs, MD, FAAN, Professor of Neurology, Medicine, Pediatrics, Pathology, and Laboratory Medicine, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry

Dr Sacks' ability to describe his own and his patients' neurologic symptoms and syndromes helped me to appreciate the nuances of brain function and many of the phenomena of everyday life, as well as the problems of my own patients. I also learned firsthand of his own sense of wonder at the patients we see. Dr Sacks served as a reviewer for Neurology while I was the editor-in-chief, and his reviews?one of which is framed on my office wall?were often as entertaining as his articles and books.

Steven P. Ringel, MD, Professor and Vice-Chair, Department of Neurology, University of Colorado School of Medicine; Editor-in-Chief, Neurology Today

As a senior neurologist who values educating the public about neurologic disorders, I greatly admire the keen insights and clear writing skill of Oliver Sacks. His curiosity, broad neurologic knowledge, and compassion for people with disabling conditions is readily apparent in his many contributions. I treasure reading everything he has written.

Concetta M. Tomaino, DA, LCAT, MT?BC, Executive Director and Cofounder, Institute for Music and Neurologic Function; close friend and colleague for 35 years

Every sickness is a musical problem; every cure a musical solution ?Novalis

"Welcome, Ollie."

This handwritten note, on a torn piece of loose leaf paper, was sent to me via interoffice mail 35 years ago, in March 1980. "Ollie," I learned, was the attending neurologist, Oliver Sacks. It was my first week at Beth Abraham Hospital, home to his Awakenings patients, and my new job as the music therapist. I had spent the 2 previous years at a skilled nursing facility in East New York, where I had seen the dramatic impact music had on residents with end-stage dementia. These residents, I was told, "had no brains left." However, when I sang and played music for them, they could recognize familiar songs and recall lyrics.

No one at the facility could understand my excitement of the prospect that music could reach persons with dementia. So you could imagine my delight when I received that strange, torn note. The staff neurologist seemed to understand the role of music in medicine. I was eager to find out who "Ollie" was. It would be a few weeks before I met him in person.

I was assigned to the units where those awoken with L-dopa still resided. Most were in wheelchairs and totally dependent in their daily care, yet still could sing with full voice and lost their hyperkinetic movement when engaged in drumming or moving to music. In their charts, I would find a neurology note and request to "the music therapist" to describe "how was she in music," or asking "Can she replicate a rhythmic pattern?" or "Does she initiate movement?" I began to look at my clinical work more closely: What in the music allowed these responses to occur?

One day I saw one of my patients who was nonverbal, physically rigid, and with severe dementia waiting in line for her neurology evaluation. I stood there until the neurologist appeared. "Dr Sacks, this is my patient; would you like to see how she responds to music?" "Oh, yes; do bring her in," he replied enthusiastically. Thus began our first session together.

I observed as this somewhat quiet and socially awkward physician sat face to face with the patient, gently holding both her hands and softly singing "Daisy, Daisy, la la la, la la la." She opened her eyes, moved her hands in his and smiled. I told him I used a different song?"When the Saints Go Marching In." He asked me to sit with her and sing it. I too sat face to face, held her hands and started to sing "Oh when the saints"?to which she immediately chimed in, "go marching in." He was amazed and delighted.

For the months that followed, I had more opportunities to meet Oliver and share questions about music and neurology. I soon learned he lived near me in the Bronx. He invited me to his new home on City Island, where he shared the personally written journals of the Awakenings patients. These journals were filled with personal accounts of each of my patients during the period when they were able to move around and interact freely with others. They also contained not-so-nice accounts of what it was like to be spoon-fed and treated like a child. It opened my eyes to the inner worlds and minds of our patients.

We began to discuss what was it about music that could reach our patients so quickly and deeply. For each question I had, Oliver pulled a book from his collection of first editions?Henry Head, Hughlings Jackson, Charles Darwin?and introduced me to the founding fathers of neurology and evolutionary science. He gave me copies of A.R. Luria's book The Man with the Shattered World as my introduction to how a damaged mind has to reconstruct the world to be engaged with it. I shared information about the field of music therapy, of the potential for treating people with music. We were excited by the prospect that music was able to change and improve our patients brain function in ways not yet understood. The concept of neuroplasticity was very new.

In the mid 1980s, we met with several scientists to see whether they could help us study music and the brain, but they laughed and said that music was too complex and the science of the brain still too new. In 1993, I organized a symposium on clinical applications of music in neurologic rehabilitation; Oliver gave the keynote, titled "Music and the Brain." With the success of the symposium, our hospitals' board of directors gave us support to create the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, whose mission is to scientifically explore music and the brain in order to develop more effective music therapy treatments to awaken, stimulate, and heal through the extraordinary power of music. Oliver has been an advisor since its inception, and I the executive director.

It is impossible for me to describe the impact that Oliver's mentoring and friendship has had on my work and my life over all these years. I am eternally grateful for this amazingly brilliant, generous, and caring man who has taught me so much about the mind?but most important, of the humanity and individual spirit of the patients we care for.

 

[Retired]

Yes, this is how Oliver Sacks rolled in 1961 (in Greenwich Village on his BMW)

We are thrilled to announce that his new memoir, On the Move, will be published in early May (you can preorder it now). Here is what the publishers have to say about it:

When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: ?Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.? It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction and then in New York, where he discovered a long forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life.

With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions ? weightlifting and swimming?also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists?Thom Gunn, A.R. Luria, W.H. Auden, Gerald Edelman, and Francis Crick among them? who influenced him. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer ? and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.

 

[Retired]

Oliver Sacks, neurologist - obituary
The Telegraph
August 30, 2015

Neurologist who chronicled the dignified struggle of his patients in books such as Awakenings

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who has died aged 82, wrote perceptive accounts of intriguing neurological disorders in books such as Awakenings (1973) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985); away from his work he was variously a biker, weightlifter and wild swimmer.

Sacks?s writing fascinated and inspired writers and film directors and showed how patients who are isolated by disease can still retain their dignity and humanity.

Sacks?s subjects were people afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations; people who had lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; people unable to recognise common objects; Tourette?s syndrome sufferers stricken with violent tics and grimaces and unable to stop themselves shouting obscenities; sufferers from Asperger?s syndrome who cannot relate to other people but often possess uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.

In his best-known book, Awakenings, Sacks told the extraordinary story of a group of patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx where he worked as a consultant neurologist. The patients were survivors of the great epidemic of encephalitis lethargica (sleeping sickness) that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and had spent the subsequent decades in a comatose state, unable to initiate movement.

Their cause had long been given up as hopeless, until 1969, when Sacks tried the ? then new ? Parkinson?s disease drug L-dopa, which had an astonishing ?awakening? effect, transforming previously lifeless individuals into personable and intelligent human beings. Tragically, most of the patients eventually returned to their former frozen state as the drug ceased to have an effect.

W H Auden declared Awakenings to be a masterpiece of medical literature. It inspired a play by Harold Pinter and an Oscar-nominated film starring Robin Williams as the dedicated doctor and Robert De Niro as a patient temporarily freed from years of catatonia.

Sacks wrote several books of case histories of which the best known was The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a series of accounts, including that of the titular man: a music teacher whose visual agnosia made it impossible for him to recognise everyday objects and caused him to try to pick up his wife?s head and put it on his own as if it were a hat. The story inspired an opera of the same name by Michael Nyman and The Man Who, a play by Peter Brook.

Sacks?s ability to combine scientific detachment with sympathetic understanding of the pathos of his patients? predicaments and the astonishing resilience of human life, gave his books enormous poise and power.

Sacks was just as precise and affecting when analysing his own life. One of his most moving accounts was that of his own singularly traumatic childhood, which he described with his characteristic mix of detachment and engagement in Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001). More intimate details materialised in his autobiography On the Move (2015) in which he revealed his past drug use ? ?staggering bouts of pharmacological experimentation?, noted one reviewer ? and his private life.

Sacks never married, lived alone for most of his life and was chronically shy. In the book, however, he revealed details of his homosexuality. In America he pumped iron on Venice?s Muscle Beach and became a leather-clad biker. He wrote that he was in thrall to ?images of bikers and cowboys and pilots, whom I imagined to be in precarious but jubilant control of their powerful mounts?. On learning of her son?s sexuality, however, his mother exclaimed: ?You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born?. When he turned 40 Sacks had a week-long liaison with a Harvard student. ?After that sweet birthday fling,? he recalled, ?I was to have no sex for the next thirty-five years.?

Oliver Wolf Sacks was born on July 9 1933 into a Jewish family in Cricklewood, north London, the youngest of four sons of a pair of wealthy physicians. He had an idyllic early childhood, waited on by an army of servants and spoilt by a vast extended family of remarkable intellectual brilliance.

Among a gallery of eccentric uncles and aunts were a pioneer radiologist, a prominent Zionist who was entrusted with the translation of the Balfour Declaration into French and Russian, and a physicist who developed Marmite and invented a luminous paint used in the Second World War. A cousin, Abba Eban, would become the first Israeli ambassador to the UN.
This idyll was rudely shattered by the outbreak of war when young Oliver, then aged six, and his elder brother Michael, were evacuated to a Midlands boarding school called Braefield. There they were subjected to a regime of unrelenting cruelty by a headmaster who was ?unhinged by his own power ... vicious and sadistic?.

The experience drove his brother mad and robbed Oliver of his faith in God. He was left with a host of phobias. His response was to take refuge in the unthreatening and impersonal world of science and mathematics. One of his aunts, a botanist, took him to Kew Gardens and the Natural History Museum, where dioramas of archaic plants and ferns, including the Jurassic cycads, became his ?dreamscapes?, evoking ?an Eden of the remote past.?

But what really caught his imagination was chemistry. It was one of his mother?s 17 siblings, his uncle Dave (or ?Uncle Tungsten?) the owner of a light bulb factory in Farringdon, who opened his nephew?s eyes to the magical world of atoms and molecules. Back home, young Oliver was given a free rein by his busy parents to conduct his own experiments.
In a makeshift laboratory in the family home, he proceeded to produce clouds of noxious-smelling chemicals, making ?volcanoes? with ammonium dichromate, setting fire to the garden and, on one occasion, burning off his brother?s eyebrows. At St Paul?s School, he shared his passion with Jonathan Miller who accompanied him when on one memorable occasion he dropped 3lb of pure sodium into Highgate Ponds.

Sacks read deeply, delving into 18th and 19th-century texts to understand how the sciences had evolved. His great heroes were Humphry Davy, Marie Curie and Dmitri Mendeleev, the inventor of the periodic table ? a chemical chart which gave the young Sacks intimations of ?the transcendent power of the human mind?.

But Oliver?s mother, an obstetrician-gynaecologist, was determined that her son should follow her into the medical profession and took pains to ensure that he became acquainted with anatomy by bringing home malformed foetuses for him to dissect, an exercise that filled him with revulsion. ?She never perceived, I think, how distressed I became,? Sacks wrote, ?and probably imagined that I was as enthusiastic as she was.?

Later, when he was 14, she arranged his first experience of dissecting a human corpse ? the body of a girl . ?Delight in understanding and appreciating anatomy was lost, for the most part, in the horror of the dissection,? he recalled. ?I did not know if I would ever be able to love the warm, quick bodies of the living after facing, smelling and cutting the formalin-reeking corpse of a girl my own age.?

Yet, Sacks did become interested, and went on to take degrees in Physiology, Biology and Medicine at Queen?s College, Oxford, and at Middlesex Hospital Medical School, later taking junior medical posts at the hospital.

By this time he had become fascinated by neurology and in 1960 moved to Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco to study the subject. In California he rode with the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club and won a state championship for weightlifting .

At the hospital he once dropped his lunch into a centrifuge; ?I was always dropping things or breaking things,? he confessed, ?and eventually they said: 'Get out! Go work with patients. They?re less important?.?

His banishment from the laboratory took him in 1965 to Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx ? the hospital in Awakenings. At the same time he was appointed instructor in neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and as a consultant neurologist at the Headache Unit, Montefiore Hospital. From 1971 he was consultant neurologist to New York?s Little Sisters of the Poor, a home for the aged, and from 1992 was adjunct professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine.

Sacks wrote a total of 13 books, including: Migraine (1970), A Leg to Stand On (1984, detailing his recovery from a mountaineering accident), Seeing Voices (1989) ? which examined the world of the deaf as seen by the deaf themselves ? and The Island of the Colourblind (1996). In 2001 Sacks was treated for an ocular melanoma ? which he wrote about in The Mind?s Eye (2010). Earlier this year he announced that the cancer had spread to his liver and he had only months to live.

He won numerous awards, including being appointed CBE in 2008. Yet he had little regard for status. He never bothered about his clothes and as a keen swimmer would turn up to interviews with his ?swim-bag?. He lived on City Island (which he would swim around) in the Bronx and kept an office in Greenwich Village, where he showed visitors his collection of artefacts, maps, lumps of metal and unusual plants ? the mementoes of a peripatetic life.

Sacks was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, though he claimed: ?the only memberships I enjoy are in the British Pteridological Society and the American Fern Society?.

Oliver Sacks, born July 9 1933, died August 30 2015

 

[Retired]

Oliver Sacks, MD, Story-telling Neurologist, Dies at 82
Medscape Medical News
August 30, 2015

Oliver Sacks, MD, the neurologist and best-selling author who wrote about the human spirit as much as the human brain, died today at the age of 82.

The British-born author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat announced in a New York Times op-ed piece in February that he had terminal liver cancer. The tributes that normally come after the funeral rolled in beforehand for Dr Sacks to appreciate. Sandeep Jauhar, MD, PhD, author of Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician, said Dr Sacks demonstrated that it was possible to be both a physician and a writer, and that the two pursuits "could nourish each other."

"Sacks wrote about his neurologically quirky characters with so much sincerity and humanity that he made you want to go anywhere with him, both in the literary sense but also in a personal sense," Dr Jauhar told Medscape Neurology earlier this year. "He seemed to be such a good, caring doctor and human being, the kind of person you'd want as a best friend."

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, the chair of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, recalled Dr Sacks as a stout "gnome-like little man" with a twinkle in his eye whose clinical reports read like short stories. "Oliver was a uniquely gifted person with amazing observational and expressive talents," Dr Lieberman told Medscape Neurology.

Dr. Sacks' final months were literary to the end. In April, his memoir, On the Move, was published. The cover features a photograph of a muscular young man in a leather jacket astride a motorcycle. He continued to publish op-ed pieces in the New York Times, the last appearing on August 14. Titled "Sabbath," this personal essay described a strict Orthodox Jewish upbringing (no turning on the stove or other work on the Sabbath) and a subsequent search for personal rest. He began to find it at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx during the 1960s where he "felt something of a mission" to tell the stories of the catatonic patients whom he revived with the drug L-dopa. They would become the subjects of his 1973 book Awakenings, which later achieved a life on stage and film.

"I had discovered my vocation, and this I pursued doggedly, single-mindedly, with little encouragement from my colleagues," he wrote. "Almost unconsciously, I became a story teller at a time when the medical narrative was almost extinct."

Other books by Dr Sacks depicted how people lived with neurological conditions that ranged from Tourette's syndrome and autism to Alzheimer's disease and musical hallucination.

His career path as a clinician seemed determined from his birth in 1933. His mother was a surgeon; his father, a general practitioner. Dr Sacks earned his medical degree at Oxford University and went on to residency training and fellowship studies at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and the University of California?Southern California. At the time of his death, he was a professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine.

In his last published piece in the New York Times from 2 weeks ago, Dr Sacks took one final look in print at his life.

"I find my thoughts drifting back to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week," he wrote, "and perhaps the seventh day of one's life as well, when one can feel that one's work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest."

 

[forgetmenot]

RIP Dr. Sacks wish there was more people like you in this world wish i could have met you in person such a compassionate caring soul you had.